Frederic Lardinois

Frederic has spent more than five years covering news and providing analysis about technology, the industry and consumer tech related to the Internet with potential to influence industry direction. At TechCrunch, his focus spans from emerging technologies and niche startups to major product advances by industry titans – all innovation focused. Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded Silicon Filter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite).

Latest from Frederic Lardinois

The popular online genealogy service MyHeritage today announced the launch of its MyHeritage DNA service for helping its users uncover more about their family’s history and ethnicity. Users who take the test, which currently costs $79 (plus shipping), will get a detailed ethnicity report that will map their families’ ethnic and geographic origins and, if available, the report will… Read More

Google today launched the first major update to its Firebase backend-as-a-service platform since it first announced its plans to turn the service into its unified platform for developers six months ago. While Facebook decided to shut down its competing Parse service earlier this year, Google decided to double down on Firebase (which it acquired in 2014) as its flagship development platform… Read More

Adobe today showed off a new experimental tool, Project VoCo, at its annual MAX conference in San Diego. Project VoCo lets you edit speech as easily as text — and you can’t just edit existing text, you can even use the same voice model to create completely new recordings, too.
Here is how this works: Project VoCo needs about 20 minutes of voice samples from a given speaker. It… Read More

Google Home is an interesting product to review. In a way, it’s just an internet-connected microphone and speaker array that draws all of its smarts from the cloud. On the other hand, it’s maybe the purest reflection of Google’s ambitions in both the artificial intelligence and home automation space.
Once you get your home, setup is easy. I barely remember doing it. The… Read More

At its MAX conference, Adobe today previewed Project Nimbus, a new cloud-native, Lightroom-like photo editor that takes away a lot of the complexity of Adobe’s flagship photo-managing and editing application and replaces it with simpler, smarter tools. For now, Adobe is sadly not releasing this tool to the public, but you can expect a beta next year.
In recent years, Adobe focused… Read More

Houzz, the popular platform for all things home remodeling and decorating, is expanding to India. This marks Houzz’s entry into its fourteenth market, but none of its current markets can obviously rival the sheer size and growth potential of the Indian market.
In addition to the expansion into India, Houzz is also launching its Pro+ local marketing program and subscription service for… Read More

Adobe today announced that it has partnered with Reuters to bring the news agency’s video and photography to its Adobe Stock marketplace.
Until now, Adobe Stock mostly focused on creative images and videos, but with this partnership, it is also adding editorial content. This includes Reuters photos that cover current news, sports and entertainment events. There are currently twelve… Read More

Adobe is hosting its annual MAX conference for its creative community in San Diego this week. Unsurprisingly, the company is using this event, which will feature keynotes by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, to announce a lot of news around its Creative Cloud applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere, as well as its new tools for interactive designers like Adobe Experience… Read More

Typekit, the font subscription service Adobe acquired back in 2011, always offered an all-you-can-use model for accessing the thousands of fonts in its library. That model isn’t going away, but in addition to its subscription plans, Adobe today announced the Typekit Marketplace that makes more than 6,000 fonts available for individual purchase with a perpetual license without the need… Read More

More than ever, graphic designers today are expected to be able to create eye-catching photorealistic images; to do so, they often must combine 2D and 3D assets into a single scene. Traditionally, that’s been a very complex and time-consuming task, but with Project Felix, Adobe today announced a new project that makes it surprisingly easy to take 3D assets and integrate them into… Read More

ValiMail helps enterprises protect their inboxes by making it easier to authenticate incoming emails with the help of the DMARC standard and related open protocols. At its core, this allows businesses to ensure that nobody can use their own domain names for a phishing attack against their employees, and gives enterprises more insight into how their internal and external email services are… Read More

Nitrous.io, an online development environment and IDE, today announced that it is shutting down its service on November 14.
The service is now closed for new signups and the team says it will refund any payments made after October 16. Nitrous’ existing users will be able to download their existing data soon.
The team says that it will also soon release an open-source version of its… Read More

Google is currently making a concerted effort to make its Chrome browser faster and leaner. The company announced a project to bring down memory usage earlier this month, for example. But it also quietly started work on some other optimizations recently, too, that add up to making Chrome on Windows run about 15 percent faster than before.
Starting with the Chrome 53 release of 64-bit… Read More

Microsoft today open sourced its next-gen hyperscale cloud hardware design and contributed it to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Microsoft joined the OCP, which also includes Facebook, Google, Intel, IBM, Rackspace and many other cloud vendors, back in 2014. Over the last two years, it already contributed a number of server, networking and data center designs.
With this new contribution… Read More

Halloween is just around the corner and if there was one horror-themed phenomenon this year, it was Netflix’s nostalgia-driven Stranger Things. Google has now teamed up with Netflix to bring a Stranger Things sticker pack to the latest version of its Allo messaging app. It’s also hosting a Stranger Things scavenger hunt in New York today (Oct. 28).
The update isn’t just… Read More

HPE is in an interesting position. Now that it has shut down its Helion public cloud business, its main focus is on its private and managed cloud services, which center around the open source OpenStack cloud platform that’s pretty much the de facto standard for building private clouds now.
HPE launched version 4.0 of its Helion OpenStack platform for enterprises this week. With… Read More

GIFs may be hot today and some people may even think that they are a relatively new thing on the internet. If you’re an internet users of a certain age, though, chances are you were already using GIFs to spice up your cool GeoCities or Tripod pages with a few spinning arrows and flashing “under construction” signs back in the mid-90s. To celebrate its 20th birthday, the… Read More

OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform that allows enterprises to essentially run their own version of AWS in their data centers, was founded by NASA and Rackspace in 2010. Today, it’s being used by the likes of Comcast, PayPal, Volkswagen, CERN, AT&T, China Mobile and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in the U.K. The OpenStack Foundation’s bi-annual… Read More

Alluxio, formerly known as Tachyon, raised a $7.5 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier this year. Today, the company is launching the first commercial product based on its open source memory-centric distributed storage platform out of beta.
The problem Alluxio aims to solve is that while most businesses now create massive amounts of data, they often store them in a… Read More

Once upon a time, Google’s Dart programming language seemed ready to take on JavaScript as the default language of the web. Google was even going to give it equal billing with JavaScript in its Chrome browser. But by the time Dart was ready for prime time, JavaScript — and the massive ecosystem around it — was already miles ahead. About a year and a half ago, Google gave up… Read More